Sara Morgan and Jane Nogaki live about 800 miles apart, but share one goal.

They want to derail a U.S. Army plan to truck millions of gallons of toxic wastewater, created during destruction of the deadly nerve agent VX, from Indiana to New Jersey.

Morgan, who lives about four miles east of the Newport Chemical Depot in western Indiana, and Nogaki, a New Jersey Environmental Federation program coordinator, are among a growing number of people who say the waste should never leave Indiana.

"We've been saying all along, 'Keep it here; do it all here,' " said Morgan, who helped a local group, Citizens Against Incineration at Newport, defeat an earlier Army plan to incinerate the VX, which is so deadly a single drop could kill a person in minutes.

An Army contractor this year began neutralizing VX by mixing it with hot sodium hydroxide and water. The byproduct, a caustic wastewater, is being stored in containers until the Army decides where it will go for final treatment.

Some say recent setbacks in Newport probably doomed the Army's plan to ship the byproduct to New Jersey -- where opposition already was high -- to be treated at a DuPont plant and discharged into the Delaware River.

Operations were halted for more than two months following two small spills and discovery that the wastewater was more flammable then originally thought. Destruction resumed Friday with officials saying they had found a way to reduce the flammability. But nobody is going to want to take the wastewater now, said Paul Walker, who monitors the destruction of chemical weapons for Global Green USA, an international watchdog group.

"To me, this is another nail in the coffin of the transportation proposal," Walker said. "I had said well over two years ago that they should just process (the byproduct) on site."

The Army originally planned to treat the wastewater in Newport by processing it in a reactor under high pressure and at high temperatures until it decomposed.

But small-scale testing of the technology revealed significant problems: Reactor liners were being eaten away and had to be replaced often, and equipment kept getting clogged, said Jeffrey Linblad, spokesman for the Army's Chemical Materials Agency. He said it was determined that there were existing facilities off-site that could treat the waste instead.

Changing that plan now would cost a lot of money and delay the entire process, perhaps by years, he said.

"If we wanted to do it on site, we're looking at at least two years of further (research and development) work, then the cost involved," in assembling the system and completing the work, he said.

Linblad said additional costs of research and development and constructing the system are estimated at $300 million. He said he did not have a cost estimate for the Army's current plan.

But the Army has met opposition at every turn -- first in Dayton, Ohio, where the local county refused to grant a permit for treatment of wastewater there, and now in New Jersey, where environmentalists, residents -- even the governor -- have moved to block the plan. Many worry the wastewater could contain tiny amounts of VX that, even treated, still could harm fish and other aquatic life in the Delaware River.

DuPont has said it can safely treat the byproduct and has submitted additional information to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which are reviewing the plan. But residents aren't convinced.

"There is no scenario under which we would accept (the wastewater) coming to New Jersey," said Nogaki.

Tracy Carluccio, director of special projects at the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, said her group would file a lawsuit, if necessary, to stop the plan.

"We're going to fight it to the bitter end," she said. "I think there is a lot nobody knows about how the (waste) is going to interact with the environment. It's only been a matter of months since they began neutralization and they already had two very important problems arise. I have no confidence in anything they say."

More than 250,000 gallons of VX has been stored in Newport since 1969, when the U.S. stopped making chemical weapons. An international treaty calls for destroying chemical weapons by 2007, although the U.S. cannot meet the deadline and is expected to seek a five-year extension.

That's why Walker hopes the Army quickly decides to change course.

"On paper, transportation looks good and cost-competitive, but when you put a political implementation lens on it, it becomes complicated," he said. "We're still talking about weapons of mass destruction and people are still unnerved."

Call Star reporter Tammy Webber at (317) 444-6412.